Word: joplin
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...tiny zephyrs of sound. Twisted (Never Again) sounds like echoes from a carnival, with spinning ferris-wheel-like choruses and offbeat funhouse instrumentation. On the bluesy I Can't Lie, Seger lets herself go, howling some of the final lines with a gleeful abandon that evokes a carefree Janis Joplin...
...this theater, or a classic-rock FM station? The hits of the '60s and '70s have lately become as ubiquitous on the legit stage as the endlessly recycled standards of Gershwin, Porter and Kern. In addition to Nyro and Joplin, Jim Morrison and his life and music were the subject of another recent off-Broadway show. The '70s hits of the Swedish rock band Abba make up the score for Mamma Mia!--a hit in London that's due on Broadway this fall. A new Beatles musical, All You Need Is Love, is about to open in London...
...Both Joplin and Nyro (who died of cancer in 1997) are back together onstage, after a fashion--each being celebrated in a new off-Broadway show. In Eli's Comin', five performers (including golden-voiced Broadway vet Judy Kuhn) wend their way through a bookless compendium of 20 of Nyro's best-known songs. Though assembled into a very loose narrative (young girl arrives in New York City; by the end she's sharing confessions with what looks like a therapy group), the show works best--marvelously--as a showcase for Nyro's idiosyncratic and influential music, a lush, emotionally...
Love, Janis is a more ambitious but less satisfying show, in which well-amplified renditions of Joplin's hits (Piece of My Heart, Me and Bobby McGee) are interspersed with excerpts from letters to her parents. It's overlong and a bit overblown: so great was Joplin's talent that it takes two performers (one sings; the other does most of the talking) to encompass her. Make that three: because of the role's "vocal demands," two performers alternate nights as the singing Janis...
...creators of these shows, of course, don't 'fess up to anything as crass as pandering to nostalgia. "Janis Joplin's music sells better now than it did 20 or 30 years ago," says Jennifer Dumas, producer of Love, Janis. Diane Paulus had never heard Laura Nyro's music before she was asked to direct Eli's Comin', and she argues that this new breed of musicals fits perfectly in the theater's participatory tradition. "If you can bring music into the theater that the audience already has a connection to, you're just increasing the power of what...